Four shuriken, fanned wide so she couldn't slip them all with one step, were flying toward her.
Karura swayed left, let two pass, and caught the third out of the air by the ring. The fourth she ignored, because the fourth was the feint. The real attack was the boy who arrived behind it, low and fast off a Body Flicker, his heel already scything at her knee.
Yashamaru's kick was sharp. Months of drills had burned the sloppiness out of it. She rode the kick backward, hands meeting the packed sand of Training Ground Four, body inverting, and her legs came around in the spinning sweep that he knew was coming because she'd taught it to him. He dropped flat under it, rolled, and came up grinning.
The grin was also a lie. The grin was for her eyes, so her eyes wouldn't be on the ground.
The cloth came out of the dust where he'd rolled, a pale strip of it he'd buried in the sand before the match started, and it snapped around her left ankle and cinched tight.
"Now, Sasori!" Yashamaru shouted, hauling the cloth taut with both hands.
Twenty meters away, a small red-haired boy moved his fingers.
Crow's lower arm cracked open and a dozen senbon spat out in a flat volley, hip height, aimed not at where Karura stood but at every place a person with a bound ankle could dodge to.
Karura didn't fight the cloth. She went with it.
She threw her weight into the pull, let Yashamaru's own tension whip her low and sideways, and the senbon hissed through the space where dodging would have put her. Her free foot hit the ground, her bound foot pivoted on the cloth, and she spun down the line of the strip itself, closing the distance to Yashamaru along the one path he'd never considered: the leash he was holding.
His eyes went wide. He let go of the cloth.
Too late. She was already inside his guard, and she kicked him directly in the chest, sending him sliding back on his butt.
"Dead." She said.
"NOT DEAD!" Yashamaru shot back to his feet. "That was one hit! Barely anything at all!"
"You weren't supposed to get hit at all."
"Listen, sometimes things don't always go perfectly to plan. I had the perfect backup plan already in place because I knew that somehow you would still manage to escape our deadly combo!"
"Ahuh…"
Crow had taken to the air while the siblings argued, its flight mechanism dragging a downwash of sand up off the field in a blinding curtain, and through that curtain came the second puppet, low and fast, a squat barrel-bodied thing on six scuttling arms with three eyes set in a bucket head. Black Ant. A serrated blade flicked out of one of its arm segments, a thin line of steel.
She slipped the first cut. The second she caught on the kunai she hadn't put away since the shuriken, steel ringing on steel, and through the settling sand she found Sasori where he actually was, not where he'd been standing when the sand went up. He'd moved with the cloud, both hands working, Crow circling wide overhead on her blind side with its arm-launcher reloaded.
He didn't say anything. Sasori never said anything when he fought. He just watched her with those big flat brown eyes and tried, with everything in his small body, to be a problem she couldn't solve.
The two of them had stopped taking turns about ten minutes ago. That was the real lesson of the morning, the one neither boy had noticed they were learning. Yashamaru's cloth snaked back out of the sand and went for her wrists while Crow's senbon forced her lateral, and the lateral path ran her straight into the reach of Black Ant's six arms, and for one beautiful overlapping second the baker's son and the puppeteer's grandson were not rivals at all. They were a team, herding her, cutting the field in half and then in quarters, a seven-year-old and a six-year-old running an ambush that teams trained for months couldn't manage.
Karura could have ended it at any point. That wasn't the purpose of today.
She let the quarters shrink. She let the cloth take one wrist, let Yashamaru whoop in triumph, let Crow's senbon drive her the last step into the reach of Black Ant's arms, the barrel in its belly already grinding open to swallow her, and then, when both boys had fully committed everything they had to the trap, she showed them the gap in it.
Body Flicker.
One of the techniques she'd trained quite a few times under Tenfold until falling sand crawled. She was inside the trap, and then she was behind Sasori with the cloth's severed end fluttering down where she'd been, cut on the edge of one of Black Ant's arm blades in passing, and her kunai came to rest in front of his throat and her free hand settled on top of his head.
Sasori clicked his tongue.
Across the field, Yashamaru was holding a limp strip of cloth and staring at the empty trap. "Wha. Where. When…"
"Dead." Karura said softly.
Sasori's hands dropped. Crow and Black Ant sagged on their threads, Crow dropping out of the air to land hard, Black Ant's six arms folding under it, the barrel grinding shut on nothing. He stood there for a moment with her fingers still resting on his hair, and then he said, in the flat voice he used when something was being added to a list inside him, "Crow drops too slow out of the air after the sand. Black Ant needs to be able to do more than just capture. How frustrating…"
"Don't be frustrated, Sasori. It's not that Crow or Ant isn't good enough. It's just that I know too much about them since I helped with their births." Karura put away her kunai.
"And that's why you tell us how important it is to withhold information from the enemy..." Sasori murmured.
"Absolutely. Information is one of a shinobi's most powerful tools."
"I understand but that doesn't help me defeat you."
Karura giggled. "The point of this training isn't for you to beat me. It's to better yourselves."
"You don't know how insulting that is to hear, Karura…" Sasori grumbled.
"Sasori-kun. I'm a jonin. A special jonin, but still a jonin. You're an academy student. Both of you. Do you think academy students should be able to beat a jonin?" Karura gently asked.
"... No. I suppose not." Sasori was not satisfied.
Karura ruffled his hair. "Focus on improving yourself with every session. Your chakra control, your awareness, your planning, your teamwork. Aim to be a better puppeteer than the one you were yesterday."
"I understand." Sasori didn't disagree.
Perhaps it was a bit too ambitious of him to aim to defeat a special jonin so soon. His attainment of being able to control two puppets at once at the age of six was something that not even his grandmother or Karura accomplished. So within two to three years he has to aim for controlling ten puppets at once. A small smile appeared on his face as he could already see himself with ten puppets lined up around him. Despite not even having ideas of ten puppets yet. Hmm, he would have to get on that as soon as possible…
Yashamaru came pounding over, sand in his hair, cloth trailing off his shoulder like a defeated banner. "Okay but TOGETHER we almost had you. Tell her, Sasori. Tell her we almost had her. The box was closing, I had the wrist, the barrel was coming, that was almost, that was basically."
"We didn't almost have her." Sasori shook his head.
"We almost did!"
"She let the box close. She wanted to see if we'd finish it." Sasori looked up at Karura, and it wasn't a question. "You let it close."
Karura crouched down so she was level with both of them. Sweat-streaked, sand-dusted, seven and six years old, breathing hard, and between the two of them they had pushed her this morning harder than most could. Yashamaru's cloth-work was sharpening; he'd buried strips before the bell and she hadn't seen him do it. Sasori could control two puppets at six, because all her teaching had honed his control to a razor.
"Most enemies would've died to that. I'm just not most enemies."
Yashamaru lit up like a lamp. Sasori tried very hard not to and mostly failed; the corner of his mouth gave him away.
"Which is why," she went on, and felt the morning tilt under her, because there was no good way into this, "I want you to remember exactly how it felt. Both of you. Because you're going to be training without me for a while."
Yashamaru's grin held for one more second on momentum alone. Then it didn't.
"...What does a while mean?" he asked.
"I have a mission. A long one. Months." She said it plainly, because they were shinobi children of a shinobi village and they would have to deal with this soon enough as well. "I leave sometime soon. I'll be traveling with the Wind Daimyo's court across the whole country, and I won't be back until it's done."
Silence on the training ground. Somewhere up the canyon a hawk cried.
"Months?!" Yashamaru exclaimed.
"Months."
He looked at the sand. His hands closed around the strip of cloth, and she watched her little brother stand at a fork, between the six-year-old who would have wrapped himself around her waist and refused to let go, and whatever he decided to be next.
He lifted his head. His eyes were bright.
"Fine," he said. "You know what? Good. Go. Because when you come back I'm going to be a whole new man. Top of my class isn't even, that's nothing, that's already done. By the time you come back I'll have already graduated, and you're going to walk through the gate and not even recognize me."
"I'd recognize you."
"You'll BARELY recognize me."
Sasori had said nothing. He was looking at Crow and Kuroari where they knelt in the sand, and his hands were folded behind him.
"Sometime soon," he said, "isn't enough for what I had planned..."
"We'll make do!" Karura didn't want to end things on a somber note..
"I'll graduate early as well. Before you return." He turned and looked at her, and there it was, the thing she sometimes glimpsed in him and never knew whether to be proud or frightened of, that focus with the temperature of a forge. "I'm also going to improve Crow and Black Ant. I'm going to develop new puppets just like you do. And when you come back, Karura, I'm going to be far better than before."
"Wow, just steal my whole everything, huh?" Yashamaru laughed.
"No." Sasori stored away Black Ant and Crow.
"You did, idiot Sasori!"
"You of all people cannot call anyone an idiot."
"Oh, what's that supposed to mean? You know I'm the top of my class, right? Huh? Huh? What you gotta say about that?"
"The king of idiots is still an idiot."
Karura stood up and let them go at it for a moment, because the sound of it was something she wanted to take with her, and then she raised one hand and both boys stopped fighting.
"Then it's a contest," she said. "While I'm gone, you both train hard. When I come back, you both show me what you've built. And whoever impresses me more," she paused, letting it land, "gets a special prize."
Two pairs of eyes locked onto her.
"What special prize?" Sasori said.
"Something special."
"That's not a real answer," Yashamaru said. "Is it a puppet? Is it a jutsu? Nee-chan. NEE-CHAN. Is it a jutsu?"
"It's something special." Karura said serenely, and began walking off the training ground, and behind her the rivalry she'd just lit burst into open flame, the two of them already arguing about judging criteria, and what counted as impressing, and whether rebuilding two puppets beat reinventing cloth-work, and neither of them noticed what she knew and they didn't.
She was going to reward them both. She'd already started planning what. There had never been a version of this where one of them walked away with nothing; there wasn't enough nothing in her whole body to give to either of those boys.
But they didn't need to know that for months, and the not-knowing would make them train like demons.
…
Hana's puppet came in with a padded practice blade leading from its right hand.
Ryu's puppet caught it on the forearm. Wood cracked against wood and the blow shoved the puppet back half a step, and Ryu went with it. He slid left as it slid, keeping his body behind its shoulder, keeping his threads short and out of reach. A week ago he would have stood rooted where he was and watched his puppet get knocked flat in front of him.
Hana saw the gap close and changed lines. She was the best in his class, a narrow-faced girl from the dye-works families who'd mastered four limbs in her first month, and she knew the first rule in the Brigade: you don't beat the puppet, you beat the puppeteer. Her puppet broke off the blade and darted wide, arcing around to the right, going for the open floor between Ryu's puppet and Ryu himself, going for him.
The whole hall had stopped to watch. Apprentices hung off the sandbag racks. Two of them had climbed onto a half-built frame by the far wall to see over the crowd.
Ryu stepped right.
He didn't think about it. His feet just went, and his puppet turned with him, pivoting on its planted leg so that it stayed squarely between Hana's puppet and the threads running from his fingers. Hana's puppet found itself charging into a raised wooden forearm where open floor had been a heartbeat before.
It hit hard. Both puppets staggered. Hana's recovered first, and swung its blade overhead at the crown of his puppet's head.
His puppet leaned back from the waist and the blade whistled through where its head had been, and in the same motion its leg shot out low into Hana's puppet's knee.
The hinge folded backward with a sharp crack.
Hana's puppet went down on its side, one leg bent the wrong way, its blade arm flailing at nothing. She yanked at her threads, controlling it with a bit more force now that she had to work a puppet with one leg. A one-legged puppet wasn't enough to deal with Ryu's fully functional puppet. She managed to last a few more minutes but eventually Ryu defeated her.
The hall was silent for one second.
Then it erupted.
Ryu sat down hard on the stone, soaked through, his threads dissolving off his fingertips, laughing up at the ceiling like a madman. Hana crossed her arms before scoffing. "You win this time, Ryu." Someone thumped Ryu on the back hard enough to knock him forward. Someone else was already arguing who went up against Ryu next.
Karura clapped with the rest of them.
"A week ago," Ryu said from the floor, still breathless, "I couldn't make the dang thing walk."
"I told you you'd know how to move by the end of the week."
"You did." He chuckled. "And I didn't even believe it myself!"
She then turned her attention to the rest of the class.
"Daigo-san will be taking the class while I'm away," she said to the room.
The big jonin stood by the racks with his arms crossed. A year ago he'd stood in the Brigade assembly and called fighting her a waste of his time. Then she'd walked past his puppet in under a minute. He'd started sitting in on her lessons a few weeks back, at first because his pride needed to know how, then because he genuinely wanted to learn. Somewhere along the way he'd started answering the recruits' questions before she could. He'd do fine.
"Don't slack off just because he's easier on you than I am."
"Easier?" Ryu stared at her. "Nobody is easier on us than you. He's terrifying."
Daigo had a threatening smile on his face. Two recruits in the front row leaned back.
"A change of pace will do you all some good. Being coddled all the time isn't for the best." He said.
…
Master Chiyo had tea waiting, which meant Ebizo-sensei had made tea and Chiyo was taking credit for it.
They sat in the workshop, and Karura told them the shape of the mission they had both already heard everything about, and Chiyo interrupted her four times to correct details she'd gotten from her own sources, and Ebizo drank his tea and watched the two of them with the contentment of a man at his favorite theater.
"Nobles and ladies will test you." Chiyo said. "They fight in a similar manner to shinobi, however far less directly. They fight with manners. They'll talk over you, around you, about you while you're standing there. Court people believe a shinobi is a sword that walks, and a child shinobi is a sword they can be careless around." She refilled her own cup and not anyone else's. "Let them believe it. A ninja they're careless around is a ninja that hears everything. You'll learn more about the Land of Wind in one careless dinner than some learn in years."
"Yes, Master Chiyo."
"The Guardians aren't bad, I guess. Some of them came from our village but not all of them. I think a few of those fellows came from temples and other places within the Land of Wind. Work with them but don't let them order you around. I know how nice you are but don't let them push you around. Your only job is to protect the heir and listen to the Daimyo. And speaking of the heir, he is, by every account I have, an annoying spoiled little brat." A pause. "Keep him alive anyway."
"Yes, Chiyo-sama."
"And get your rest whenever you can. Don't let them slave you away. The desert doesn't care how big your chakra is if your judgment is stupid with exhaustion. Look at what one tired boy nearly cost us." It was said in passing.
"One tired boy?" Karura questioned.
"Three nights of full moon and he hadn't slept through any of them. On the third afternoon he sat down in the shade." Chiyo's voice didn't change. "The One-Tail's bloodlust becomes intensely amplified during full moons. Always has. He's a tough boy. He's had bad nights before. Sand up to the shoulders, a wall or two. We've always gotten there before the rest of it followed. Last week we didn't." She drank.
Karura looked into her tea. The boy from the lower district who admired her. She hadn't decided what to do with what she knew now.
"Can I visit him, Master Chiyo?"
"For what?" Chiyo squinted at her busybody protege.
"Reasons…" Karura averted her gaze as she poked her fingers together.
"That boy is strong enough. He doesn't need any comforting or cheering up from a meddling little girl like you." Chiyo told her.
In actuality, she didn't want the jinchuriki forming any closer attachments with her protege. The boy was the village's weapon. A weapon wasn't supposed to be cheered up. A weapon wasn't supposed to form attachments. A weapon wasn't supposed to be soothed after making a mistake. Chiyo understood it may seem cruel, but as soon as one was the host of a tailed beast, they were no longer human but a village's secret weapon.
"Yes, Master Chiyo." Karura said in the voice that meant she'd think about it.
When she rose to leave, Chiyo got up with her. She had, in fact, considered a parting gift, had even stood in this workshop two nights ago eyeing her own poison cabinet over it, and had dismissed the idea with a snort. The girl collected seventy percent on every component hundreds of puppeteers bought. Whatever Chiyo could hand her, the child could buy nine more of by lunch. She was almost certainly the richest student a teacher had ever been too proud to admit out-earning her.
She had no idea how short her guess fell. Nobody did. There were district budgets in Suna smaller than what sat sealed in the storage scrolls of a nine-year-old who still helped her father carry flour sacks, and the village treasurer would have needed to sit down.
"Come back with your sanity intact." Chiyo laughed.
Ebizo and Chiyo walked her to the gate of the courtyard. The evening was going violet over the canyon rim.
"She'll miss you terribly," he said. "She'll be unbearable for months."
"Do you want a slap upside the head, Ebizo?" Chiyo threatened.
"I'll miss you Master. And you too, sensei."
"Mm." He looked down at her with a smile. "Out of all the students I've sent down long roads in my life, you're the first one I'm not worried about. Do you know what I am instead?"
"What?"
"Interested."
"Interested?" Karura repeated.
"I have a feeling this mission with the Daimyo's Court won't be as typical as it would be for any other shinobi. I think you're going to surprise us." Ebizo explained.
"That doesn't sound good…" Karura was getting freaked out.
"Don't think too hard about it. Just be yourself. Like always." Ebizo chuckled along with his sister.
"I do my missions normally, okay?" Karura narrowed her eyes at the two grownups laughing at her.
"Ahuh, sure you do." Ebizo laughed a bit harder. "Revitalized an entire country."
"I just! Got rid of some bad guys! I didn't do anything to rebuild their entire stuff!" Karura's face was flushed as she tried to defend herself.
"Feeding the hungry, hydrating the thirsty, growing mutant cacti that pulled a whole city back from somewhere it had no business coming back from. Just an everyday occurrence for Karura." Chiyo laughed even louder.
"I will be excusing myself!" Karura's face was beet red.
The room had no windows, which was the point of it.
Toma sat against the far wall, knees drawn up, in the grey quiet where they kept him now. The seal on the floor glowed faintly even in the dark. They'd told him it was temporary, observation only, until the seal was confirmed stable, and they'd told it to him kindly enough, but the door was iron and the kindness had locks on it.
He didn't blame them. He'd seen the damage after he came to. They'd carried him past it on the way here, and he'd made himself look, because looking felt like the right thing to do. This happened because of him. Because he'd fought off sleep three nights running under a full moon, and on the third afternoon his eyes had closed anyway… The one time he couldn't afford to…
Voices came through the door. The ANBU rotation changed at night, and the new pair always talked for a few minutes before settling, and the wall was thick but his ears had spent twelve years listening.
"The north's worse than they're saying. My cousin's building came down with her in it."
"She make it?"
"That's the thing. Wooden arms came through the rubble and dug her out. Hundreds of them, she says, like the sky grew hands. Passed her along the line gentle as you like and set her down by the shelters." A low whistle. "The puppet girl they say. Had her dolls flooding the village while the jonin were dying outside the village. They're saying the count came in at a tenth of what it should have been. A tenth. Because a nine-year-old decided so."
"Special jonin now, I heard. Youngest ever."
"Earned twice over, you ask me..."
The voices moved off down their rounds.
Toma didn't have to wonder who they meant.
He thought back to the chunin exams. Three of her puppets between them, the grinning one and the hooded one and the proud one with the fan, and he'd lost, and it had still been the best day of his life. He'd bowed to her first, because that was what you did for someone like her. And she'd bowed back. Bowed. To him. Said his name with a -kun on the end like he was a boy and not a thing the village kept sealed away, and told him he deserved to be taken seriously, and meant every word of it. He'd gone red to the ears in front of the whole gallery. He still went red, here, in the dark, thinking about it.
People had died because of the monster inside him. He would carry it like he should. But fewer this time. Far fewer than the worst of the nights before this one, the nights the sand had come up through his skin in his sleep and the ANBU had come through the door before it could finish.
Whole streets of people walking around and complaining about the dust and alive, because of her… The same girl. The only one who'd ever looked at him with kindness had spent herself to the bone cleaning up his mistake.
He pressed his forehead to his knees.
He hoped, harder than he'd hoped for anything, that she never learned the rest of it. Let the rest of the village hate him, that was fine. But if the girl he admired ever looked at him the way the guards did through the gap in the door, he didn't think there'd be enough of him left to seal back up.
He hoped that she never found out that he was the jinchuriki of the One-Tail... That was all he wanted. That, and to thank her someday, even if he never got the chance.
The full moon was past. He let his eyes close, almost.